Believing... and Belonging
Sermon preached in St Salvator's Chapel, St Andrews on 31st January 2010 by Professor Philip Esler
Readings: Haggai 2: 1 - 9 & Luke 2: 22 - 40
In the rich distillation of the collective memory of Christians that is the annual cycle of our liturgy, today we are celebrating the Feast of the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple.
The precise date of this Feast is 2nd February, 40 days after the birth of Jesus on 25th December. The Presentation of Jesus has been celebrated since at least as early as 380 AD. You may know it by another name: Candlemas. In medieval times all the church candles for the year were blessed at Mass on this day.
So as we gather here today we stand with our Christian brothers and sisters before us in an unbroken tradition of over sixteen centuries and in the sure knowledge that those who come after us will continue to celebrate this feast until the Lord comes.
We are caught up in a deep drama of memory and hope, of experience and identity, of believing and belonging.
Yet the idea of 'believing and belonging' is actually quite a tough one for many people in Britain and Europe. Across the Continent we see a different pattern becoming common: of believing without belonging, of high levels of faith in God combined with very low levels of church attendance. Many now feel they can express their religious sentiments more by staying away from places of worship than by attending them.
Beatle John Lennon, who gave up going to church after the vicar threw him out for laughing, said that later he went to church every morning¿in the temple of his own head.
Without in any way wishing to criticize those who are following their own individual paths to spirituality or to minimize the importance of individual devotion, today's Feast of the Presentation invites us to consider just what we gain by remaining connected with the faithful and worshipping people of God and with the places where they gather to conduct that worship.
The well-known Dominican priest Father Timothy Radcliffe started a recent book of his with a story of a mother who shook her son awake, telling him it was time to go to church. Ten minutes later she was back, demanding he get up and go to church. 'Mother, I don't want to. It's so boring. Why should I bother?' For two reasons, she said: first, you know you must go to church on Sunday and, secondly, you're the bishop of the diocese.'
Our biblical readings today open up rich seams for further responses to the question 'Why should I bother?'.
The first Israelite temple in Jerusalem, constructed by Solomon, had been destroyed by the Babylonians in 587 BC. When the Persian king Darius permitted the Israelites to return from exile in Babylon in about 520 BC, he also allowed them to rebuild the Temple.
This was the setting for our Old Testament reading from the prophet Haggai. God wants the Temple rebuilt. Why? So that the people of the land would take courage that he was with them and that his Spirit abided among them. The wealth of all the nations would flow in, and in this place, in the temple, he would give them prosperity. The place, the building in which the people worshipped God, would be the site of his blessings poured out upon them. We will inevitably regard this as a rather materialistic picture, with the Temple a bit like a vast and up-market tithe barn. But in the fragile ecology of ancient Israel, where crops failed regularly and where hunger was common, it was inevitable that divine blessings would be interpreted in terms of material prosperity.
And yet there is more in our Haggai reading than this. The Lord speaks through Haggai saying, 'Who is left among you that saw this house in its former glory? How do you see it now? Is it not in your sight as nothing?'
God wants any survivors of the destruction of the Temple 65 years earlier to affirm to the rest of the people its recollected former glories by contrast with its current pitiable state.
Even across so many years, God wants his people to be reminded of the past by those among them for whom it was still a living memory. Like most groups of any significance, Israel was a community of memory where individual Israelites connected the people as a whole with past experiences in particular places that had decisively shaped their present character, values and identity.
And the annual cycle of feasts in the Temple crystallized the memories of the people in relation to the most momentous events in the history of their relationship with God.
To belong to a community such as this, in ancient Israel or in a modern church, is to know that our individual biography, our own life-story, is enriched by being part of a larger group narrative that begins long before us and will continue long after we have gone.
And it is a group narrative that is enacted on a regular cycle. It includes repeated moments of concentrated experience when we gather in some place, like today, rub shoulders with one another, and renew our shared commitment to one another and to our God. We lift our spirits and fortify our faith by mutually reminding ourselves of what we value, what we believe and who we are.
And it doesn't really matter whether we do it in a sublimely beautiful medieval chapel like this one, or in a shattered rural church in Haiti, or gathered around a collapsible altar on a battlefield in Afghanistan - the result is the same.
It¿s something we just can't do on our own. When the medieval church said, Unus Christianus, Nullus Christianus, 'One Christian is no Christian', this is what it meant.
The Gospel from Luke, Chapter 2, brings us forward 500 years to revisit the Temple in Jerusalem. This was the same Temple that was built in the sixth century BC, but it had been extensively rebuilt by Herod the Great from 19 BC onwards. It was one of the most impressive buildings in the ancient world. The Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, with its enormous stone slabs, is actually just part of the retaining wall for the platform on which it was built. Herod's builders did most of the re-building in 18 months, but some work still dragged on 70 years later. Those of you who have ever tried to get a building project finally completed will know the feeling!
In accordance with the Law of Moses, Mary and Joseph bring Jesus to the Temple in Jerusalem to present him to the Lord and to offer a sacrifice. In so doing the Holy Family were taking part in the daily cultic life of Israel in its national shrine. Luke tells us later that they went up to Jerusalem every year for the Passover (2.41).
Jesus would follow in their footsteps. When he had begun his ministry he used to go off into the wilderness to pray (5.16), yet he still attended synagogue every Sabbath (4.16) and also went to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover.
The main thing that happens to Mary, Joseph and Jesus in the Temple is that they meet two marvellous, elderly Israelites, Simeon and Anna. They are repositories not only of the collective memory of Israel but also of its collective hope for the consolation of Israel, and for the redemption of Jerusalem and humanity generally. It is Simeon and Anna who tell Mary and Joseph that the six week old baby they hold will be the agent of this transformation. Yet the news is not all good: Jesus, Simeon tells Mary, is destined for the rise and fall of many in Israel and a sword will pierce her heart too. So from two fellow Israelites, in God's house, Mary learns of the destiny that awaits her son, herself and all peoples. A lot to mull over on the road back to Nazareth.
If even a diocesan bishop can at times find Church boring, we should not be surprised if sometimes we do too. But that is not the end of the story. Family life can be tedious at times, too, but most of us gladly put up with it because we regard our relationships with our family as indispensable to our lives and happiness on this earth. Most of us would not agree with the recent statement by the actress Frances de la Tour, that 'we are all in this - alone'.
Belief without connection to a community of faith is a poor and probably in the long term unsustainable alternative to believing and belonging. Faith is nourished in community; even Jesus, who regularly went out to the desert to pray, found his way back to the synagogue and Temple and their communally embedded belief and practice.
By keeping alive our membership of the church and taking part in the cycle of its liturgy we gain strength from belonging to a community which regularly remembers and rehearses the great events in the long narrative of our engagement with God in places specifically set apart for that purpose, a community whose members share central values, beliefs and ways of living in the world.
Perhaps we feel this most keenly in services that connect with the big moments in human experience: birth, marriage and death. But the reality is the same even on the most ordinary Sunday of the year.
It is on all these occasions when we gather with our fellow believers that we experience the full force of what God has spoken and continues to speak through Haggai, firstly in the Hebrew original:
'My Spirit abides among you; fear not'.